Whew! It's been a hectic couple months in Washington. Shutdowns, massive web glitches, WWII veterans storming memorials. I need a bit of a breather. More to the point, I've got a new book out and am due to spend a good chunk of the month running around and talking to folks about Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age. The upshot: I'm going to take a few weeks respite from blogging. We'll have three weeks of guest blogs and then return to regularly scheduled programming during Thanksgiving week.

The week of November 4, in a wonderful case of synergy with Breakthrough Leadership, we'll have Eric Westendorf. A former teacher, principal, and Stanford B-School grad, Eric is co-founder and CEO of LearnZillion (which makes an appearance in the book). LearnZillion is an ed tech venture that tries to help connect teachers and students with a terrific library of online instructional resources. Eric is going to weigh in on professional development, how we improve it, and the implications for teaching and curriculum.

The week of November 11th, we'll have Jal Mehta. Author of the fascinating The Allure of Order, Jal is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a really provocative thinker on a range of questions, including teacher professionalism, the future of schooling, how to best make sense of international comparisons, and the tenuous relationship of policy to professional practice. He'll argue that neither the "reformers" nor their critics are looking at the world the right way, and suggest another way of making sense of our challenges.

The week of November 18th, we're fortunate to once again have the inimitable Neerav Kingsland. CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, Neerav is one of the more intriguing and compelling thinkers in education today. He combines a bracing taste for big ideas with hard-won experience and an impressive humility. It all makes him an incisive thinker, as illustrated by the success with which he's pushed the notion of "relinquishment" to the forefront of the discussion about urban school reform. He'll be talking about the future of school governance in urban school systems.

Enjoy, and I'll see you later in the month.

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